bluefish

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Bluefish Development

Bluefish is an open source project, released under the GNU GPL licence. Bluefish development is mostly coordinated on the bluefish-community mailinglist (see below). On the list, both users, developers and testers can give their opinion on new features, bug fixes and GUI improvements.

Contact

If you want to join the community, most activity takes place on the mailing lists. Please use the mailing lists for general questions about the program or the development. You can contact olivier (at) bluefish.openoffice.nl for questions regarding the bluefish project management.

Bluefish is on Facebook, but most developers are no longer active Facebook users.

Reporting Bugs

For bugreports please go to our bugtracker.

Mailing lists

Bluefish recently switched to a new mailinglist to discuss development, features, bugs, ideas, etc. You can subscribe at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bluefish-community. There are also archives for the community list.

Our old mailing lists can also be read as newsgroups at gmane bluefish-dev and gmane bluefish-users.

Help needed

Help is welcome on various parts:

• We are working on more plugins, which requires some C, gtk or python knowledge
• Writing the manual in our wiki
• Translations - several languages are out of date, see the WiKi
• Testing
• Creating packages - we currently lack a Mandrake and a Suse maintainer!
• Better native Windows support, there are many bugs specific to windows reported!
• Better native Mac support

Code in Subversion

Bluefish uses SVN (Subversion) hosted by Sourceforge to manage the code. You can browse the repository on-line.

To build the latest Bluefish version from SVN:

svn co svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/bluefish/code/trunk/bluefish cd bluefish ./autogen.sh ./configure make su -c "make install"

For more information see the wiki page Compiling Bluefish from source code.

Bleeding edge Debian/Ubuntu packages

There is a Bluefish-snapshots PPA at https://launchpad.net/~klaus-vormweg/+archive/ubuntu/bluefish-snapshots. Use these at your own risk, the software in these packages is still under development!

Debian/Ubuntu packages can also be created from the subversion repository. These are NOT official packages and should only be distributed as "bluefish-unstable". Only use the script and the created packages if you follow the development. For "normal" users, official packages are available here.

svn co svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/bluefish/code/trunk/bluefish cd bluefish ./make-deb.sh

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History

Bluefish was started by Olivier Sessink, Chris Mazuc and Neil Millar in 1998 all being frustrated by the lack of decent web development editors for Linux. It's editor design with syntax scanning was inspired by NEdit which was available for Linux at the time, but the user interface was inspired by Homesite which was only available for Windows. It was shortly called Thtml editor and Prosite and shortly after the name Bluefish was chosen after a logo was proposed by Neil Millar. Since version 1.0, the original logo was replaced with a new, more polished one. Gradually the editor because more generic supporting most popular programming languages and adding many standard IDE features.

Because Robin Millar (who worked for the Open Source Technology Group) was an enthousiast Bluefish user it became one of the first projects on Sourceforce. More facilities where provided by heavy users such as the mailinglist at ems.ru (archive), the download site at bennewitz.com and hosting at openoffice.nl. In 2000 the mailinglist eventually also moved to sourceforge. Bug tracking was originally at gnome bugzilla. When gnome moved to git the bugtracking moved also to sourceforge.

The 1.0 branch was started in 2005. The 1.0 released even featured on slashdot which was a big thing at the time. The 2.0 branch was started in 2010 and featured a completely new designed syntax scanning engine and was ported to gtk-2. The 2.2 branch was released in 2011 and was the first release to support gtk-3, but gtk-2 is still supported.

Timeline

• Earliest history is lost.. Code was synchronised via email and patches, there was no source code revision system.
• December 1998, thtml codebase 43 was created
• January 1999 the name Prosite was proposed
• Somewhere in 1999 the codebase got the final name Bluefish and there was a 0.3.2 release. Not sure if 0.1 or 0.3.0 or 0.3.1 also existed.
• Oktober 1999 a mailinglist was created at ems.ru, an archive exists starting around 2007
• Oktober 1999 0.3.3 first release that is 64bit capable (running on DEC Alpha)
• November 1999 release 0.3.4 with initial Javascript and CSS support
• January 2000 release 0.3.5 with multi file loading support, PHP support, and the first translations
• January 2000 Bluefish 0.3.5-1 officially added to Debian by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho.
• February 2000 release 0.3.6 (that had 14 pre-releases!!) which featured a coding style for Bluefish developers, showing a bit more mature codebase.
• May 2000 move code to sourceforge cvs. The versioning scheme is also changed, release 0.4 with initial multibyte character support (e.g. UTF-8), a regular expression capable search and replace function, and FreeBSD support.
• August 2000 release 0.5 with a spell checker dialog, auto indenting and the "custom menu" functionality. A HPUX package was added and a Sun Sparc package was created..
• December 2000 release 0.6 with a CSS editor dialog and a color dialog. And found bugs in gtk-1.2 on the way..
• July 2001 0.7 release, this is the first release that works on Windows using Cygwin thanks to Daniel Leidert.
• January 2002 0.8 release, which is gtk-2 compatible, but uses the old gtk text widget
• May 2002 started to use bug tracking on bugzilla.gnome.org
• June 2003 0.9 release, minor updates
• July 2003 0.10 and after the 0.11 releases (which was part of the first Fedora release)
• November 2003 0.12 release, with project management support and remote files over GnomeVFS
• April 2004 0.13 release, minor updates
• February 2005 the new logo was done, designed by David Lyon!
• February 2005 the 1.0 release!, essentially also a minor update. The Bluefish codebase is mature now. The release was even featured on the frontpage of Slashdot.org
• June 2005 1.0.1 release, adding a quickstart dialog, make spaces or tabs configurable, and the Fedora package is now provided by the Bluefish development team.
• July 2005 1.0.2 release, minor updates
• August 2005 1.0.3 release, minor updates
• August 2005 1.0.4 release, a quick release because there was a compile error
• February 2006 1.0.5 release, minor updates
• September 2006 1.0.6 release, first Mac package (using Fink)
• November 2006 1.0.7 release, minor release, and essentially the last release based on the old (gtk-1) text widget
• Oktober, 2007 a discussion is started on a new syntax scanning engine (that could do autocompleton!!) based on deterministic finite state machine created by Oskar Świda and later re-implemented by Olivier Sessink
• 2008 Hard work on the gtk2 editor widget porting and the new scanning engine. No releases.
• December 2008 1.3.0 release, the port from the gtk-1 editor widget and GnomeVFS to the gtk-2 GtkTextView widget and GIO/GVFS is usable again!
• January 2009 1.3.1 release, which is working much better, the new syntax scanning engine quickly recognises many more programming and markup languages
• August 2009 1.3.6 release with syntax-aware in-line spell checking
• November 2009 1.3.8 release with a 2x speed improvement in syntax scanning, and fixed 64bit support for the gtk2 port
• February 2010 the 2.0.0 release, which moved the stable version to the gtk-2 GtkTextView widget and introduced the completely new syntax scanning engine, and has the first native Windows installer
• June 2010 2.0.1 release
• September 2010 2.0.2 release
• February 2011 2.0.3 release
• November 2011 the 2.2.0 release added gtk3 support while retaining gtk2 support. The search and replace was completely redesigned and this release featured 'block selection'.
• November 2011 Bluefish 2.2.0 is installed by default on the just released Solaris 11 desktop.
• December 2011 2.2.1 release with zen-coding support
• February 2012 2.2.2 release, mostly bugfixes
• June 2012 2.2.3 release, lorum-ipsum generator, and most HTML dialogs are now HTML5 compliant
• February 2013 2.2.4 release with improved split-view, improved language syntax detection, CSS tidy and minify, javascript minify, and php beautify support
• January 2014 2.2.5 release with much faster syntax scanning using aggressive caching of old results, and project, indenting and bookmarks improvements
• April 2014 2.2.6 release, mostly bugfixes
• Febryary 2015 2.2.7 release, HTML5 becomes the default, better autocompletion, and the charmap plugin is now supported on Mac OXS
• May 2015 moved from CVS to Subversion
• January 2016 2.2.8 release, mostly bugfixes, and SASS syntax support
• June 2016 2.2.9 release, minor bugfixes
• January 2017 2.2.10 release, improvements on Wayland
• January 2020 2.2.11 release which moves to Python 3 and many small improvements
• November 2020 2.2.12 release, supports enchant2 for spell checking
• February 2023 2.2.13 release with full CSS3 support
• June 2023 2.2.14 release, first Flatpak release on Flathub
• March 2024 2.2.15 release, some bugfixes, indentng indicator line and Yaml syntax support

Other projects from Bluefish developers

Olivier Sessink is also known for:

• Directory Assistant - an LDAP addressbook frontend
• Jailkit - a set of utilities to limit user accounts
• Scannedonly - a scalable high performance Samba anti virus module
• Risk Reduction Overview or Risico Reductie Overzicht - a risk management tool

Daniel Leidert is also known for:

• lots of Debian packages, and Ubuntu packages